Shangaa: Art of Tanzania ed. by Gary van Wyk, and: Sogo: Maschere e Marionette Bamana ed. by Barbara Gianinazzi, Paolo Maiullari (review)

In recent years, exhibition catalogues of African art have often assumed the refreshing character of comprehensive scholarly monographs. Such publications include not only illustrations of the objects exhibited, but also essays based on meticulous research and field photographs that provide ethnographic context. A number of these catalogues can easily stand on their own, separate and apart from the exhibitions that they accompanied. While special exhibitions of African art can be powerful visual events, they are by their very nature ephemeral. However, scholarly catalogues, whether written by single or multiple authors, can continue to inform intellectual discourse on exhibition content for many years into the future.

Shangaa: Art of Tanzania, edited by Gary van Wyk, represents one of the finest of this genre of publications. It is comprehensive in its discussions of Tanzanian art forms, reflects the meticulous scholarship of the editor and other contributors, and provides readers with a sweeping portrait of the country through numerous field photographs.

Van Wyk, who was born in Zimbabwe and studied in South Africa, was eventually exiled from South Africa because of his activities in the antiapartheid Resistance Art Movement. He later completed his doctorate in art history as a Fulbright Scholar at Columbia University. He is not only the editor and a contributor to this volume, but was also the curator of the exhibition of the same name that was held at the QCC Art Gallery of the City University of New York, February–May 2013. This exhibition, which later traveled to the Portland Art Museum, contained one hundred and sixty objects from both public and private collections in Europe and the United States. Van Wyk brought to both the exhibition and this volume his internationally recognized expertise in East and South African art.

A number of books on Tanzanian art have been published previously. These include Ladislas Holy’s Masks from Eastern and Southern Africa (Hamlyn, 1967); Charles Bordogna and Leonard Kahan’s A Tanzanian Tradition (The African Art Museum of the SMA Fathers, 1989); Marc Felix’s Miwana Hiti: Life and Art of the Matrilineal Bantu of Tanzania (Verlag Fred Jahn, 1990); and Jens Jahn’s Tanzania: Meisterwerke Africanischer Skulptur/Sanaa za Mabingwa wa Kiafrika (Verlag Fred Jahn, 1994). More recently, many of the Tanzanian objects in the collection of Carl and Wilma Zabel were illustrated in Charles Bordogna’s The Discerning Eye: African Art from the Collection of Carl and Wilma Zabel (The African Art Museum of the SMA Fathers, 2005).

As the above volumes demonstrate, the arts of Tanzania have been regularly placed before the public. However, Shangaa does so in what is the most comprehensive, accessible, and spectacular manner to date. As a result, it lives up to its title, which in Kiswahili means “amaze.” The book is divided into ten chapters in which the exhibited objects are illustrated in textual contexts and not segregated in a separate and distinct section. In many instances, similar objects in the field are also illustrated. This integration of illustrated exhibited objects with descriptive text and field photographs helps to provide readers with both a visual and ethnographic understanding of the arts of Tanzania. Shangaa is outstanding for its organization, comprehensiveness, the quality of its writing, and the meticulous research supporting the text. These qualities, coupled with its superb physical appearance, make it the current definitive work on Tanzanian art.

Sogo: Maschere e Marionette Bamana is a work that illustrates the globalization of African art. Written in Italian by several contributors, it was published to accompany an exhibition of the same name at the Museo delle Culture in the Italian-speaking...